God was in a pickle (not really but let's go with it for the moment). God had promised to act decisively in and through Israel to redeem creation. Unfortunately Israel was not being very cooperative. As we discussed two weeks ago Israel, because of the trauma it had endured over the 500 or so years before the birth of Jesus, had essentially withdrawn from the wider world. Its primary goal was survival and not the redemption of the world. So what was God to do? The solution was to call forth one from the midst of Israel who would act on Israel's behalf…a messiah who would fulfill Israel's calling of world-wide redemption. Scripture tells us that this messiah was born into the lower middle class in rural area of occupied Judea. His parents named him Jesus. What is fascinating however is that each of the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) treat Jesus' arrival, ministry and death in very different ways. Today we will look at his arrival.
In the oldest of the Gospel narratives, Mark, we first meet Jesus on the occasion of his baptism. There are no birth stories. There are no shepherds or angels. John the Baptist is doing his thing (baptizing Jews for the remission of sins), Jesus shows up, gets baptized and begins his ministry. Mark then shows Jesus as the teacher whose life is to be imitated.
In the Gospel of Matthew we find a Jesus who is the fulfillment of the promises to Israel. This is made clear in that Jesus' genealogy in this Gospel places him in the lineage of both Abraham and David (as the prophets had declared), has him born of a virgin (again as prophets had declared), and then named Jesus (meaning God saves). An angel even tells Joseph that Jesus will save God's people from their sins. Thus Jesus is the one who will do for Israel, and for the world, what God had promised.
Luke expands upon this image of the work of Jesus by linking Jesus not only into the people of Israel but to all of humanity. Luke does this by offering us a genealogy which stretches all the way back to Adam. In other words Jesus will not only create a new Israel, as in Matthew, but will create a new humanity altogether. Luke, more than the other Gospels attempts to locate Jesus' birth in both specific historical moments (when Herod the Great still ruled) but also in specific places (Bethlehem, the city of David). His account is by far the longest and most complex. In it we have shepherds, angels, people proclaiming Jesus as messiah even before he is born as well as Mary's wonderful song which we call the Magnificat. Much of this birth narrative is intended to lay the groundwork for Jesus' ministry in which the entire world is turned upside down (rich brought low, poor exalted, etc.) as it is being made new.
Finally in the Gospel of John we see the beginnings of Christ reaching even further back than Adam. In the Gospel of John we discover that Jesus was the eternal Word, the co-creator with God and the Spirit. We learn that the Word then became flesh (incarnate) in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. It is this Jesus of Nazareth who knows the Father and has come to reveal the Father and the Father's will to the world. In this sense then there is no birth story, because Jesus is eternal with the Father. Jesus' first appearance in the Gospel of John is when John the Baptist points him out and declares that Jesus is the "Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world." Thus the Gospel of John declares that as Jesus begins his ministry it should be obvious to anyone with spiritual eyes, that he is the one who will save the world.
So who is this Jesus? It is a question with which the church has been struggling for the past two thousand years. Often the church has settled for simplistic and comfortable answers. As we move down this road to redemption I hope we will be willing to be open to the wide variety of images the scriptures offer us that we might embrace Jesus in all of his fullness and complexity as the one who loved and saved the world.
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